1,721,160 research outputs found
Intelligibility, Practical Reason and the Common Good
No full textThe new natural law theorists, such as Germain Grisez and John Finnis,argue that intentional human action is oriented towards a plurality ofbasic goods. These basic goods render human action intelligible. Theintelligibility of an action is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for itsreasonableness. What, then, does it mean for an action to be intelligible orunintelligible? This paper argues that actions are intelligible or unintelligiblerelative to a background context of social practices. A theory of the basicgoods, then, is at least as much an interpretive theory of social practicesas it is an ontological account of human nature. This understanding ofintelligibility reveals an important connection between the basic goodsand the common good. The common good, understood as the project ofcreating a social environment that offers a wide and generally accessiblearray of modes of human flourishing, not only facilitates pursuit of the basicgoods, but makes the goods possible. It does this by creating a contextwithin which judgments can be made about the intelligibility of intentionalconduct
The Nature of Law
No full textJonathan Crowe’s chapter examines natural law perspectives in contemporary philosophy of law. Natural law views in jurisprudence are united by the natural law thesis: law is necessarily a rational standard for conduct. This thesis entails that anything that is not a rational standard is either not law or a defective example of law. Crowe begins by surveying the various arguments natural law theorists have presented for their favoured versions of the thesis. He then defends his own preferred route to the thesis, which involves analysing the nature of law as a human artifact. The function of law, Crowe argues, is to serve as a deontic marker for human conduct by creating a sense of social obligation. A law that is poorly suited to this function - such as a badly drafted, unjust or unreasonable standard - will therefore be legally defective, while a putative law that is incapable of playing its function - such as an incomprehensible or deeply repugnant standard - will be no law at all. This view - which Crowe calls the artifact theory of law - vindicates the natural law claim that law is necessarily a rational standard. It also refutes the legal positivist slogan that ‘[t]he existence of law is one thing; its merit or demerit is another’
Human, all too human: human fallibility and the separation of powers
No full textIntroduction:Humans are fallible - and this fallibility is the hardest thing for us to grasp. We havelimited knowledge - and the limits of our knowledge routinely prevent us fromrealising just how much we do not know. Our reasoning processes are prone tovarious forms of distortion and bias - and these distortions and biases often cause usto overlook our own partiality. We are prone to favour familiar people and conceptsover the unfamiliar - and our lack of understanding of other viewpoints preventsus from realising the ways in which we marginalise them. We are susceptible totemptations that lead us to go against our conscience - and these temptations alsoprovide incentives not to scrutinise our behaviour
The Natural Law Outlook
No full text[Extract] The term ‘natural law’ has historically led to a great deal of confusion. This is partly due to the ambiguity of the term ‘law’, which can be understood in at least two different senses, each of which plays a significant role in natural law thought. First, the use of the term ‘law’ in this context is sometimes taken to refer to the rule-like character of natural law standards. The idea that natural law represents a set of rules or commands analogous to positive law, but emanating from God rather than humans, is certainly an influential aspect of the natural law tradition. There is, however, a second and equally important sense of ‘law’ at play throughout the history of natural law thought. This is the sense of ‘law’ as a teleological notion. Natural law, on this conception, is best analogised not with positive legal enactments, but with the regularities captured in the ‘natural laws’ of physics or biology. Humans are governed by natural law in the sense that their actions are guided by certain normative ends; these ends are what are good for humans with the nature they have.The dialectic between these two conceptions of natural law can be seen historically in the long-running dispute between voluntarism and naturalism in meta-ethics. Roughly, voluntarists hold that whatever God wills is good, whereas naturalists hold that some things are inherently good by nature, and even God may not override those values. However, defenders of one or the other of these positions frequently recognise an interplay between them, rather than preferring one to the complete exclusion of the other. A voluntarist, then, may hold that God, although in principle capable of willing anything to be good, would in practice will those things to be good that are in accordance with nature. A naturalist, meanwhile, may hold that those things that are good by nature are so because of God’s wise and beneficent design; the constraints imposed on God’s will by these natural values, then, are ultimately self-enacted. The two conceptions of ‘natural law’ outlined above – law as command and law as teleology – are therefore far from mutually exclusive. They may converge to yield a coherent picture of the natural law outlook
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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